Peter
Ellis Bean

by Archie
P. McDonald

The
American frontier produced many colorful characters, including Peter
Ellis Bean.

Bean was born in Bean Station, Tennessee, on June 8, 1783. As a youth
of seventeen, Bean joined Philip Nolan
on expeditions to the Texas central plains to capture mustang horses,
then drive them to the Mississippi River for sale to a nation whose
mobility depended on horsepower. Nolan's extra activities, whatever
they really where, attracted the attention of Spanish authorities.
Apparently they did not mind his pilfering their wild horses so much
as his cozy talks with American General James Wilkinson and other
US government authorities when back in the United States.

Spanish soldiers encountered Nolan—and
Bean—on their last expedition to Texas on March 21, 1801, in an area
that became McLennan County. Nolan was killed and Bean and nine others
captured, taken to Nacogdoches, and held in Antonio
Gil Y'Barbo's old
stone house (Old Stone Fort), before transferring them to Mexico.
The men were sentenced to death but had their punishment reduced to
decimation. They threw dice to determine the unlucky loser, and Ephraim
Blackburn threw the unlucky low dice and was executed. Bean and other
survivors were moved from town to town until he talked his Royalist
captors into releasing him to help them fight a nationalist movement
led by José María Morelos y Pavón. Soon after Bean began fighting
for the Royalists, he defected and joined Morelos and the cause of
Mexican nationalism.

Bean returned to the United States, attempting to raise men and money
for Morelos' independence movement, but he had little success in the
endeavor, but while there he served under General Andrew Jackson in
the successful defense of New Orleans against the British attack on
January 8, 1815. The next month Bean returned to Mexico,
where he remained until Spanish forces finally captured and executed
Morelos. Bean returned to the United States just in time to avoid
similar fate.

While fighting under Morelos, Bean married Magdalena Falfán de los
Godos. Forced to leave her in Mexico,
Bean remarried—apparently without benefit of divorce—Candace Midkiff,
with whom he produced three children. They lived in Arkansas and also
in East Texas, where Bean
served as an Indian agent for the now independent government of Mexico
and for a time served in the Mexican army, but did not have an active
role during the Texas Revolution for either side. Eventually Bean
returned to Mexico
and to his first wife. He died in Jalapa on October 6, 1846.